Microsoft’s Hotmail and Windows Live knocked offline

SOFTWARE HOUSE Microsoft watched as its online services including Hotmail went down for a few hours last night.

The firm's services, including Hotmail email, Skydrive and Office365 were knocked offline and so far the reasons behind the outages are unknown.

However, they are coming back online. Earlier today a tweet from the Office365 Twitter account said that all users there should be satisfied. "Thanks for your patience. We believe service is restored for all Office365 users," it said.

The Windows Live blog goes into more detail about the problem, and it adds that services should be back to normal for all users of all affected software.

"If you've been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive, or our other Live properties in the last couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services. We're aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience," wrote blogger Chris Jones.

Later he added that changes put in place by the firm had resolved the issue and restored services.

"We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers," he explained.

"Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the changes make their way through the network. Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues."

Microsoft has not released an explanation of what caused the outages. µ